‘Albums Always Scare Me to Death’

There was a time when that voice, recognizable in an instant, was virtually inescapable. Equal parts silk and sandpaper, Michael McDonald’s distinctive tenor was all over the map and the radio in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as lead singer of the Doobie Brothers and as a sought-after background singer for such hits as Steely Dan’s “Peg.”

McDonald’s solo career, from a numbers perspective, has been an up-and-down affair, but he has maintained a career driven by a faith in his heartfelt brand of blue-eyed soul. He arrives tonight in Thousand Oaks and Saturday at the Coach House, not on the heels of a hit or an album, but as a constantly working musician. (All proceeds from the Coach House show will go to a fund to benefit the wife and two children of keyboardist Chuck Sabatino, McDonald’s longtime friend and a member of his band, who recently died at 43.)

McDonald’s last album, “Blink of an Eye,” came out in 1993. It reaffirmed the singer-songwriter’s unique sound, his gospel-tinged passion and limber vocal chops. Gospel is a critical ingredient: McDonald’s amicably raspy voice always evoked Sunday morning inflected by Saturday night.

McDonald, his wife, Amy Holland, and two young children lived in Santa Barbara and then Santa Ynez for 13 years. But, yearning to be closer to the region of the country he grew up in, the St. Louis native last year loaded up the truck and the family and moved to Nashville.

There, McDonald has been building up new songs and energy for an album, which he hopes to finish this summer. In a phone conversation from his home in Nashville, he exuded an easygoing sincerity and a resistance to show-biz glibness.

*

Question: What led you to Nashville?

Answer: I always did better when I was in places where I thought there was a real artists’ community. I just felt like Nashville was the place, and is about to be even more so. . . . When I came to California, that’s where things were happening. Those were some exciting times. I’m just kind of looking for that same hit.

Q: Are you finding it there?

A: Very much so. . . . It’s a town where music and songwriting has such a ferocious momentum going that it’s fun to be around that.

Q: The stereotype is that it’s a country-music town, but that’s not your musical area.

A: Certainly country music is a big part of it, although that’s not why I came here. Nashville is a town that is very multicultural, in a music sense. Some of the best gospel music I ever heard, even growing up, was in Nashville. I used to listen to a station late on Sunday nights that was a live broadcast from a church in Nashville. It was some of the most exciting stuff I ever heard. Nashville has many types of music and always has. It has everything Memphis has, except that it’s better known for, and prides itself on, the country-western end of things.

Q: Was there a part of you that never quite felt comfortable in Southern California?

A: I think there probably was, in retrospect, in the sense that, in later years especially, I was always striving for things that I was never destined to be. . . .

I was kind of out of place with a lot of the contemporaries I worked with out there. So many of the guys I came up with were more musically articulate or more precise in their production sense on the records. I was always the guy who said, “Hey, it’s in tune enough. Let’s go for it. It’s close enough. Don’t worry about it. Let’s not beat it to death.”

I find, in a strange way, coming back here, I’m kind of in my element again. Back here, it’s . . . not such an overblown deal. I always walked around with this inferior complex, like “You don’t pay attention to what you’re doing. You should, you should, you should. . . .”

Music has a very earthy feeling back here. It’s not lofty, the stuff of the gods. There’s a workaday mentality in the music business, at least in the creative community.

Q: How concerned are you about getting another album out and keeping your career in motion?

A: I’m taking it more in my stride, I hope. Albums always scare me to death. With every one, I’ve always felt like I was bloodletting or something. This time, I’ve just started it without officially saying that I started it.

We cut about three or four tracks that were only intended to be demos, among a lot of other songs I was writing that aren’t necessarily for me at all. But the demos sounded good as they were and have a certain charm. I think I can go in and, with a little bit of after-the-fact surgery, make a record out of them.

Q: Are you a reluctant front man?

A: Yeah, pretty much. There’s a part of me that is very comfortable in it, and another aspect of it where I always feel a little sheepish. All I do is get up there and sing and play. I find myself, throughout the evening, hoping that that’s all anybody came to see, ultimately. I never considered myself a great showman by any measure. I’ll never be a real theatrically clever performer.

I go out with a show that is fairly simple, and the band is as good as I can possibly put together.

Q: It sounds as if you have a pretty healthy approach to a music career, which can be a consuming and disorienting thing.

A: Well, I have a habit of talking really well. [He laughs.] It’s just not that important. I don’t want to completely turn over my insides every time I do an album, or every time one fails or does well. It should just be what it is at its best, which is a lot of fun.

Sure, there will be the pressure and the deadlines. That I can live with. It’s when you start to get that self-imposed pressure and deadline to do something really important because, for some reason, you’ve decided that you are important to the music business--then it becomes a nightmare. . . . It’s an all-too familiar road that I’ve taken before.

I like the pace of life back here and the attitude toward making music back here. It helps me think more clearly.

* Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross and David Pack play Saturday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 7 and 9:30 p.m. $32.50-$34.50 (714) 496-8930. Also tonight at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. 8 p.m. $30-$40; (805) 449-2787.